Why use interpreted languages

At this time actually processor doesn't see our application. It just executing the virtual machine, which is executing our application. So at the end of the day what we have to understand is, all the programming languages in the world should be interpreted at some time. It may be done by a processor hardware or a virtual machine. These are completely two different things, which we can't compare. But that terminology is pretty much good to teach beginners how programming languages work. PS: Some programming languages like Java have a hybrid approach to do this.

First, compile the high-level code into byte code which is virtual-machine readable. And on the fly, a component called the JIT compiler compiles byte-code into machine code. Specifically, code lines that are executed again and again many times are get translated into the machine language, which makes the interpretation process much faster. How Java JIT compiler works. Compile is the process of creating an executable program from code written in a compiled programming language.

Compiling allows the computer to run and understand the program without the need of the programming software used to create it. When a program is compiled it is often compiled for a specific platform e. Apple platform. Today, most high-level languages will include their own compiler or have toolkits available that can be used to compile the program. Depending on how big the program is it should take a few seconds or minutes to compile and if no errors are encountered while being compiled an executable file is created.

Compiled language: Entire program is translated to machine code at once, then the machine code is run by the CPU. Interpreted language: Program is read line-by-line and as soon as a line is read the machine instructions for that line are executed by the CPU. But really, few languages these days are purely compiled or purely interpreted, it often is a mix. For a more detailed description with pictures, see this thread:. What is the difference between compilation and interpretation?

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Compiled vs. Interpreted Languages Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 4 months ago. Active 1 month ago. Viewed k times. You chose exactly the worst languages for this comparison. Both are bytecompiled.

The only real difference between them is the JITer, and even Python has a partial one psyco. A good example of an interactive compiled language is Clojure - everything is fully compiled first to the JVM then to native code via the JIT. However a lot of the recompilation happens dynamically, and development is often done in an interactive REPL shell where you can evaluate any function you want in the running environment.

Standard ML is another interactive compiled language; the built-in compiler issues real native machine code too. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. No need to run a compilation stage: can execute code directly "on the fly" Can be more convenient for dynamic languages Note that modern techniques such as bytecode compilation add some extra complexity - what happens here is that the compiler targets a "virtual machine" which is not the same as the underlying hardware.

Marie 6 6 bronze badges. Kareem: the JIT compiler only does 1 and 2 once - after that it is native code all the way. The interpreter needs to do both 1 and 2 every time the code is called which may be many, many times So over time, the JIT compiler wins by a long margin. Yes bytecode is translated to machine code at some point during the overall program execution as opposed to before program execution, as is the case with a traditional compiler. It probably only gets compiled once from bytecode to machine code.

Hence the runtime overhead of JIT is small, and can be ignored for long-running programs. After the JIT compiler has finished doing its job, you will effectively be running pure machine code all the way. This is actually a false dichotomy. There is nothing intrinsic to a language that makes it compiled our interpreted. It is nothing more than a widely held misconception.

Many languages have both implementations and all languages can have either. While in an theoretical sense a given language definition can be both compiled and interpreted, in real world practice there are considerable differences in implementation. Nobody has yet solved how to effectively compile certain language constructs, for example - it is an open research problem.

There are benefits to compiling and there are benefits to interpreting. Just because compiler technology is developing to improve on certain languages features don't mean we can say anything about the benefits of compiling a language with that feature.

Conflating language and implementation causes us to have false understandings of choosing compilation or interpretation for an implementation. For example your comment "[interpreters] Can be more convenient for dynamic languages" — mmachenry. Show 8 more comments. So generally categorizing languages by "compiled" and "interpreted" doesn't make much sense.

I agree. Or let's say: There are native compilers creating machine code for the CPU to eat , and not-so-native-compilers creating tokenized stuff, i. The latter are interpreters. Today, native compilers which directly produce machine CPU code at compile-time are becoming more and more rare. Start thinking in terms of a: blast from the past Once upon a time, long long ago, there lived in the land of computing interpreters and compilers.

The general opinion at that time was something along the lines of: Interpreter: Fast to develop edit and run. Slow to execute because each statement had to be interpreted into machine code every time it was executed think of what this meant for a loop executed thousands of times. Compiler: Slow to develop edit, compile, link and run. Fast to execute. The whole program was already in native machine code. NealB NealB 16k 2 2 gold badges 35 35 silver badges 60 60 bronze badges.

The extreme and simple cases: A compiler will produce a binary executable in the target machine's native executable format. With those out of the way, let me explain that life ain't so simple any more. For instance, Many interpreters will pre-compile the code they're given so the translation step doesn't have to be repeated again and again.

Some compilers compile not to CPU-specific machine instructions but to bytecode, a kind of artificial machine code for a ficticious machine. Imagine you have a hummus recipe that you want to make, but it's written in ancient Greek.

There are two ways you, a non-ancient-Greek speaker, could follow its directions. The first is if someone had already translated it into English for you. You and anyone else who can speak English could read the English version of the recipe and make hummus.

Think of this translated recipe as the compiled version. The second way is if you have a friend who knows ancient Greek. When you're ready to make hummus, your friend sits next to you and translates the recipe into English as you go, line by line.

In this case, your friend is the interpreter for the interpreted version of the recipe. Compiled languages are converted directly into machine code that the processor can execute. As a result, they tend to be faster and more efficient to execute than interpreted languages. They also give the developer more control over hardware aspects, like memory management and CPU usage. In our hummus example, the entire translation is written before it gets to you.

If the original author decides that he wants to use a different kind of olive oil, the entire recipe would need to be translated again and resent to you. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Examples of when we'll use interpreted language over compiled language? Ask Question. Asked 9 years ago. Active 1 year, 9 months ago. Viewed 17k times. Improve this question.

Yusubov 21k 6 6 gold badges 43 43 silver badges 71 71 bronze badges. K L K L 1 1 gold badge 2 2 silver badges 5 5 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. There's to my knowledge no such thing as an interpretted "language" or a compiled "language". Improve this answer. Jimmy Hoffa Jimmy Hoffa EmmadKareem There's no such thing as "can't be compiled".

You write a program that reads a program in language Li and outputs an equivalent program in language La. That's a compiler a compiler. I hesitate to invoke the turing completeness argument as it's a red herring in practice, but each program ultimately turns into a sequence of machine code instructions. If all else fails, unroll the interpreter loop and simplify the resulting code to remove parts you don't need any more. If the interpreter is written in a language without interpreters, repeat until you hit something with a compiler.

I redacted my comment to phrase it better, but apparently I acted too late. EmmadKareem Yes, obviously some languages were never implemented through a compiler. But I fail to see how this is relevant. It's always possible and feasible to do so, and can be done at any time with some effort. This is a consequence of the main point, which is that a language is neither inherently compiled nor interpreted, and can be implemented in both ways. And in a myriad other ways well, arguably minor variants and remixes , by the way.

EmmadKareem if you wanted you could take the ksh language spec and write a compiler that read it and generated a native binary. The language being compiled or interpreted is not in a language's definition is my point here. Show 5 more comments. Winston Ewert Winston Ewert You make good points, but being the pedant I am, I take issue with some phrasings both referring to the third paragraph : 1. An interpreter does not compile. It is fathomable though these conditions are rare for a bad non-optimizing compiler to be beaten by a highly optimized esp.

This goes doubly if you count JIT compilers under interpreters which I prefer not to do, but some people do that. However, as far as I can tell the third paragraph does not imply that a interpreter would compile. For the second point, I emphasized on the word equivalent to emphasis similarity of compiled and interpreted code to exclude the cases of poor compiler vs.

Sorry, nevermind the first point, I misread something. Mea culpa. As for the second point: I took "equivalent" to refer to the code that is interpreted or compiled and comparing a compiler and interpreter doesn't make a lot of sense, as they do fundamentally different things.

I don't think one should waste time detailing outlandish cases like my example, but I'd prefer dropping the "always" in favor of a phrasing that explains why it can be faster in the first place: No interpreter overhead [which should be defined IMHO], and opportunity to perform optimizations before runtime.